We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Here is a story about a place I once knew. I found it via this post by “TantumErgo” in the UK Politics subreddit. “Owners of former Walthamstow pub ordered to stop using it as Buddhist temple”, the Waltham Forest Echo reports:
An unlicensed Buddhist temple operating out of a former pub in Walthamstow has been ordered to close by Waltham Forest Council.
The Confucius and Tao Association (CTA) bought the Lord Brooke, in Shernhall Street, in 2014 but was refused planning permission to convert the building into a place of worship the following year.
Contemporary reports described its purpose as promoting the teachings of Buddhism, Confucius and the Great Tao through public seminars, while working to tackle poverty and racial tension.
The council’s planning committee refused the charity’s application in early 2015, saying the use of the building as a pub was a “valued part of the social infrastructure of the area”.
No doubt many residents of Walthamstow did value the Lord Brooke being a pub, but it’s not as if they would have continued to have it as their local if only the Buddhists had not taken it over. In 2014 the pub was branded a “drug haven” by the Metropolitan Police and was “shuttered after evidence of drug use was found all over the venue.” No one has been found willing to reopen it as a pub, not surprisingly given the pub trade has been declining for years, mostly due to government actions like the smoking ban, “sin taxes” and increases in the minimum wage.
Faced with the choice between the abandoned building falling into dereliction and having it used by a group known for their harmlessness, one would think the council would jump at the chance to allow the change of use, but no, they preferred to wait for their “prince” in the form of a new landlord to come some day.
So those naughty Buddhists snuck in anyway, and started worshipping in the building so quietly that no one in authority noticed for years. They also opened a vegetarian cafe, the bastards. The Waltham Forest Echo continues:
Despite the town hall’s decision, the TCA [this is a typo for “CTA”, which stands for “Confucius and Tao Association”] appears to have gone ahead with the conversion.
It is unclear when the venue began being used as a place of worship. There is no formal signage for the temple, only for the associated Lotus Bloom Café, and historic remnants of the Lord Brooke are still in place more than a decade on.
Waltham Forest lodged a planning enforcement notice in late April, demanding the charity stops the “unauthorised use of the land and buildings as a place of worship, associated community centre, and ancillary café” and ceases “all gatherings, events and educational classes”.
So the state compulsorily closed down a pub due to it being a drug haven. The state said that the building could only be reopened as a pub. The state made reopening it as a pub a losing proposition. Then the state said that the people who had quietly reopened the building as a place of worship for Buddhists and a cafe open to all had to close it down and restore it to its previous state.
The Confucius and Tao Association ought to scatter the ground with needles and syringes for authenticity, but they are probably too nice.
Europe has spent decades believing that you can regulate prosperity, tax innovation, and distrust entrepreneurship, while Silicon Valley and Shenzhen built the future.
Now, European Commissioner Virkkunen “Spuit11” warns that Europe is dependent on American and Chinese AI for digital security. As if that were a natural disaster. It’s not a natural disaster. It’s policy.
The EU produces rules. The US produces companies. China produces scale. Europe produces commissions that explain why we’re falling behind.
– Roald Schoenmakers
No end to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s government, no end to Iran’s missile programme, no handover of enriched uranium, yes to ending US sanctions and thus forgoing any political leverage, yes to accepting Iranian (and Omani, for what it’s worth) control over Hormuz, no end to the IRGC proxy forces in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon… and, er, an Iranian promise to be nice in the future and not make nukes?
This is not being well received by everyone.
Assorted wags have remarked:
Hegseth renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War, whereupon he lost a war.
and…
Donald Trump promised the war would end with unconditional surrender, and boy did he deliver.
It would all be a lot funnier if it was not quite so tragic.
That government can be scarcely deemed to be free where the rights of property are left solely dependent upon the will of a legislative body without any restraint.
– Joseph Story
No Government has the right, whether to flatter fanatics or in mere vagueness of mind, to forge an instrument of tyranny and say that it will never be used.
– William Butler Yeats, written in 1928 in opposition to censorship legislation in the Irish Free State
There is a never ending number of biscuits, not finite. Socialists think there is a biscuit tin under the bed, everyone has to share, 1 for you, 1 for me. They fail to learn how to make cookies with their granny who thought grandad was talking sh1t. Families 😂😂
– Jean McMillan
“Mathematics will need to develop a research culture that can accommodate AI as a partner. This will involve journals that require verification, hiring and tenure arrangements that reward exposition and checking, and collaborative practices for the verification of proofs. Checking and explaining AI-generated mathematics must count as original intellectual labor. The stronger AI becomes, the more valuable this human expertise will be.”
– Daniel Kipnis, Wall Street Journal ($)
So, has anyone determined what US war aims actually are? Damned if I can figure it out.
“Black students at the University of Oxford who feel traumatised by the killing of George Floyd will be able to apply for a reduction in workload and special consideration in their exams.” That line came from a a report in the “iPaper” from June 15th 2020, six years ago today. The report continued:
The extra support was outlined in an open letter sent to students by the university on Monday.
Signed by the vice chancellor Louise Richardson and the heads of Oxford’s colleges, it was apparently sent in response to concerns raised about the welfare of black students, following the police killing of Mr Floyd in the US last month.
Click on the link to read the “Open letter to Oxford students from the Vice-Chancellor and Heads of House”. Besides devaluing the degrees of all black Oxford students who took their finals in 2020 whether the students wanted “special consideration” or not, the letter said much else of interest. For instance:
“While much is being done by many committed people, we acknowledge that we are rightly reproached for our collective failure to address the issue of systemic racism properly, and that we have work to do.”
At any one time there are several hundred Americans studying at Oxford. The terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11th 2001 killed 2,977 people. Oxford University did not offer its American students special consideration in their exams for the trauma of seeing their nation attacked and thousands of their compatriots murdered. Oxford did not declare itself “rightly reproached” for its collective failure to address the issue of anti-Americanism properly, though a much clearer line could be drawn from the output of certain Oxford academics to the 9/11 attacks than could be drawn from Oxford to George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department.
In the quarter century since then, scores of other countries have had their citizens murdered en masse by Islamist terrorists. I would hope and assume that students whose family members were murdered in the name of Islam were offered special consideration in their exams, but if the leadership of the university publicly offered it to all students from Indonesia, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, India, Pakistan, France, Russia, Kenya, Nigeria, Iraq, Canada, Australia, Yemen, Syria, Denmark, Tunisia, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Turkey, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Somalia, Niger, Lebanon, the Philippines, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Uruguay, Ivory Coast, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Iran, Finland, the Netherlands, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Austria, and, above all, Israel when their respective countries were attacked, I never heard about it.
I listed many nations above, but when the University said “We’re determined to support our Black students in every way we can” after some of them said they had been traumatised by George Floyd’s death, the support was offered to those students on grounds of race, not nation. Did it offer white students, or brown students – or black students, come to that – support when people of the same race as them were murdered in large numbers by Islamists that was similar to the support it offered black students when one man was killed by the American police? Did the leadership of the university issue a public invitation to Jewish students of all nationalities to claim extra time in their exams for the trauma of having to read about, hear about, or see on video the copious and horrible evidence of the thousand-plus murders of Jews on October 7th 2023? When Henry Nowak died just as George Floyd had, pleading “I can’t breathe” to the police officers restraining him, did Oxford “reach out” to its white students to “stand with them during these difficult moments”?
Many dismiss the type of arguments I have made above as “Whataboutery” or “whataboutism”. “Whataboutery” is the older term, having originated in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The idea behind it was that when every attempt to get people to agree that some particular terrorist act was wrong was immediately countered by the cry of “What about [insert similar atrocity by the other side here]?”, it became impossible to de-escalate the conflict. Perhaps it did make sense to disparage the practice of endlessly citing old injustices in the Northern Irish context, but I think that to cite a current or historical parallel and ask “Why are these two similar situations not treated the same way?” is more often right than wrong. People of all races should be treated equally. That is the only form of “racial justice” that is actually just. Individual justice is also the only form of racial justice that is stable. Every deviation from the simple yet profound principle of equal treatment, however well-intentioned, is like stretching an elastic band. Eventually, either the elastic snaps back, which might cause injuries from the speed of the contraction but at least restores balance, or the elastic breaks – in which case society goes to the other stable pattern, that of considering those outside the tribe to have no rights at all.
*
Related post: The main reason so many people fear Islam
Remember that photo of Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement? Leaving aside the question of whether George Floyd’s death was murder – the late Niall Kilmartin thought it was not – it was inevitable that people would eventually ask why, if the then Leader of the Opposition and now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was obliged to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness because the police in a foreign country had killed one man, should not Muslim leaders and opinion-formers make some similar acknowledgement that all these thousands upon thousands of murders preceded by a shout of “Allahu Akbar!” had something to do with Islam? Why can’t there be – why is there not – a “Kafir Lives Matter” movement?
Sir Keir Starmer is set to announce sweeping reforms tomorrow banning under-16s from 10 major social media platforms, including X, but not the Left-wing platform Bluesky.
– Toby Young
The huge influxes of research funding for compliant scientists have made it difficult to oppose the fable of a threatened planet. Any scientist who speaks up against the cacophony of nonsense about a climate threat is treated like Dr Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People. Rather than being thanked for discovering that the water of his town’s popular spa is contaminated with deadly disease organisms, Dr Stockman and his family are viciously ostracised by most of the town’s citizens, who are making a good living by promoting the supposed health benefits of the spa.
Climate nonsense will eventually end and will be dumped onto the ash heap of history where it belongs. But the longer the cult goes on, the more damage is done. We should all do what we can to stop the madness as soon as possible.
– William Happer
I came across this post by Brivael Le Pogam on X:
I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it. But it rests on three factual errors, and it’s worth looking at them calmly.
Error 1: Elon’s fortune isn’t a pile of cash. It’s ownership of factories, rockets, and satellites. “Taking half his money,” in concrete terms, means forcing the sale of half of SpaceX and Tesla. The money doesn’t come out of a safe; it comes from the companies themselves, which fall under the control of foreign funds or states. You’re not redistributing cash; you’re dismantling a tool of production. It’s the difference between harvesting apples and chopping down the apple tree.
M. Le Pogam goes on to politely describe two other errors that his interlocutor is making regarding how the richest person in the world got that rich, and how an astonishing percentage of the the poorest people in the world have been lifted out of absolute poverty in my lifetime.
His post is well worth reading for the eloquence of his arguments. But there is another, quite separate reason to give it your attention. You see, Brivael Le Pogam never actually wrote “I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it.” He wrote, “Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent.” The thought behind them was in French, but the English words I read and admired for their eloquence were written by a computer program. Over the last couple of years we have quietly reached and passed the point where automatic translation is, for most practical purposes, invisible.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
Recent Comments